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I wonder about that, too, but it looking at this [sciencemag.org], it seems that watching ocean temperatures might help clear things up, despite of the underlying mechanisms seeming way too complicated for even advanced science and models to predict / assess.

Ninety-three percent of the heat trapped by increasing greenhouse gases goes into warming the ocean, not the atmosphere. So taking the ocean's temperature is the most comprehensive way to monitor global warming.

Instead of taking Fox News or some other biased opinion as fact, simply search for and find results for yourself. Honestly, it's not that difficult since there are countless sources of data related to Global Warming.

It is worth pointing out that there are very sick people in the world that churn out papers claiming that Science is false. Read the science, not papers declaring Science to be wrong.

Last point: Even that same sick set of people, that want money more than anything else (yes, even a home for t

No, look at my post above. The icecaps are expanding in the summer, when they usually don't - but the ice is thin and is likely to melt faster. Further, the expansion may be due to local weather changes and it's certainly not evidence that we're running towards a snowball earth anytime soon.

It's just a quote of a very complex system taken out of context by very simple people.

I don't know what to believe any more. First I hear the ice poles are shrinking, and now I hear the icecaps are actually expanding in range.

Entirely possible. Imagine an Antarctic locality where temperature is -30C, precipitation is 6" per year -- and then changes to -25C, with precipitation 6.5" per year. Net effect, accumulation of mass; what becomes important is when and where this effect occurs.

Unfortunately, you can't really compare the climate from millions of years ago (along with its CO2 levels) directly to the climate of today. In the past, the sun put out less energy, there was a great deal of volcanic action, etc. If it was believed that CO2 was the only driver of climate, you could compare CO2 levels and make your claim. But it's clear from climate science that that isn't the case. It's also clear that CO2 is driving the climate change today and that change is happening very rapidly.

Don't get too terribly excited. It's always fun to quote things out of context. Even Glen Beck can do it.

FWIW, that particular phrase has been bounced back and forth via the conservative blogosphere as a mantra of All That Is Wrong with Global Warming. Too bad it's just one little tiny data point that has a variety of alternate hypothesis [nsidc.org]:

It is not clear why the maximum ice extent would happen later, given that in general, ice extent is decreasing. One possibility is that the lower winter ice extents might make it easier for ice to continue growing later in the season. With lower winter extents, a late cold snap or northerly wind could spread ice southward over ocean that would normally be ice-covered at that point. Researchers do not expect the late maximum ice extent to strongly influence summer melt. The ice that grew late this winter is quite thin, and will melt rapidly as the sun rises higher in the sky and the air and water get warmer.

The resultant climate pattern changes are unlikely to be one simple direction either forwards or backwards (warming or cooling). There will be winners and losers and t

I'm afraid the Daily Mail was mistaken (it's a terrible paper; seriously, it's a celeb gossip rag -- don't quote from it). What the columnist was referring to was this [nsidc.org]

See in 2007 when there was a record low? The article you link to was written in 2010, so all they had was 2008 and 2009 data. See how those are both higher than 2007?

Now, those are the data that columnist is referring to. Look at it yourself. Do you think that it was honestly interpreted by the Daily Mail? Would *you* have presented those data as a trend of increasing ice?

Sure. Grant money is the sole motivator of all scientific endeavor. All that cash must be the reason why all scientists are driving around in their shiny Ferraris, two bitches alternatingly sucking their cocks all the time, while snorting coke from the dashboard. Or something like that. Fascinating to see how the "poisoning the well" smear campaign by the usual conservative think tanks permeates the debate these days.

I would not go so far as to say that.But scientists have been saying that grants tend to corrupt over many things.Google it. Some of it is even not about AGW.Money has a tendency to corrupt. Science is good. Better than most I would hazard a guess.But Science is not immune.

Everything, -body farts, including good ole' Mother Earth. pffffft, now another methane hydrate crystal. Sheep, swamps, anaerobic groundwaters, anaerobic seawaters....methane is a child of Nature. Get over it.

If Earth had no Humans, I'm sure the environment would balance itself out, but with 7 Billion people, and all the damage we've done, I don't think the pendulum will be swing back anytime soon. Human's have already cut down more than a third of the forest, and we've polluted the oceans enough to increase the acidic level a significant amount. Look around you, you're not surrounded by jungle, it's millions of roads and black rooftops. We are destroying the planet, and if you think otherwise, then your the idi

If what you're saying is true, Earth should already be like Venus is today, and should have been so millions of years ago.

No, what he's saying is that there is a positive feedback mechanism that will keep going until a particular part of that mechanism stops running. That would be the supply of methane in permafrost and at the bottom of the ocean.

Your prediction is that once it gets warm, it keeps getting warmer and warmer and warmer until it becomes a new sun, or whatever absurd conclusion you're making.

Straw man and hyperbole. He didn't say that. Furthermore, you're the only one making absurd predictions - and putting them in the mouths of other people.

But instead you'd rather flip the bird at a guy who owns an SUV, blame everything on him, then look at your own smug face in the mirror while you beat off.

No idea how you got that from a comment that essentially says "hey, you're timescale assessment is wrong." Could you be projecting?

Oh by the way, you're a liberal hippie fag, dont reply, because everything you say is either DEAD WRONG, or just self-masturbatory preaching to the choir.

Ignoring the liberal application of random insults and assumptions, you seem to a) engage in the same black-and-white thinking you were decrying two sentences earlier, and b) equate being right with self-masturbatory preaching. Can't handle the truth, can you?

The funny part is that you will be the least prepared for the coming trouble. Have fun. Liberals have guns, too.

I can't speak for the grandparent, but no, it's more like arguing that because you didn't die from a bullet wound to the leg, you are unlikely to die from a subsequent bullet wound to the leg. Millions of years ago, the primordial atmosphere is believed to have been mostly methane and CO2. From that starting point, nature brought it to where it is today. In the absence of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, then, the suggestion that pushing it a fraction of the way back towards that state will cause

Methane (CH4) is a greenhouse gas that remains in the atmosphere for approximately 9-15 years. Methane is over 20 times more effective in trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide (CO2) over a 100-year period and is emitted from a variety of natural and human-influenced sources. Human-influenced sources include landfills, natural gas and petroleum systems, agricultural activities, coal mining, stationary and mobile combustion, wastewater treatment, and certain industrial process.

"Methane is over 20 times more effective in trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide (CO2) over a 100-year period" and "Methane (CH4) is a greenhouse gas that remains in the atmosphere for approximately 9-15 years".

Am I the only one who sees a huge logic flaw in that 100-year figure given the 9-15 year figure? How do the intelligent people here on Slashdot keep their bullshit meter from flying off the handle?

"Methane is over 20 times more effective in trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide (CO2) over a 100-year period" and "Methane (CH4) is a greenhouse gas that remains in the atmosphere for approximately 9-15 years".

Am I the only one who sees a huge logic flaw in that 100-year figure given the 9-15 year figure? How do the intelligent people here on Slashdot keep their bullshit meter from flying off the handle?

Imagine a retelling of Ach^W the Hare and the Tortoise. They decide to see who can run the furthest in 1 minute. At the off, the Hare sprints away but 10 seconds later he's completely exhausted and lies down to have a rest, having covered 100m in that time. Meanwhile, the tortoise plods along steadily and at the end of the minute....well, this is no fairy tale -- he's only managed 5 metres.

So, the Hare has covered 20 times the distance that the Tortoise has, even though he's only run for 10 seconds. No surprise, frankly.

Methane is actually about 70 times better as a greenhouse gas as CO2 in the short term, but we don't really care about the short term: long term effects are what are important. So, we can average it out over 100 years instead. Of course, methane doesn't just disappear when it breaks down; it ends up leaving CO2 in the atmosphere, so it has long term effects anyway. It's why, even though water is such a potent greenhouse gas, it doesn't matter as a temperature forcing mechanism because it drops out of the atmosphere within *days*. The amount the atmosphere can hold is dependant on the temperature.

However, what's bad about water, is that if something else causes the atmospheric temperature to rise, the overall effect won't just be from *that thing*. The warmer atmosphere will also hold more water which will cause an *additional* temperature rise.

>How do the intelligent people here on Slashdot keep their bullshit meter from flying off the handle?

This is a site for technically minded people, many of whom are seriously into having the latest and greatest gadgets, preferably with open-source software enhancements. Many of us are running the Acme Mark IV Series 80 Bullshit Multimeter with custom enhancements. Before connecting to/. it is important to make sure that it is set to register on the logarithmic scale and that it is securely connected

... that I think naturally come up with stories like this. Despite my science background from college (marine bio, actually, but I never use it), I find it hard to answer questions that true science novices might have such as:

(o) Why is methane bad? It's one of the gases that get trapped in the atmosphere and prevent light from escaping, which warms the planet. Um... I think.

(o) If it floats ups into the upper atmosphere, doesn't it just float into space? Uh.... no. Gravity.... I think.

Millions of years ago, the climate (read: atmosphere) would've killed large mammals reliant on an oxygen rich environment (which is what is happening now, slowly but surely). The problem isn't that life would not be able to "get by just fine." It's that if the geology of Earth shifts back towards a carbon-rich environment, it won't be conducive to living comfortably, as a human. This is my understanding, anyway.

The argument over whether or not it is a natural occurance is a big one (and worth having, IMO), but global warming nay-sayers choose to be ignorant of the fact that the "natural" environment of yester-millenia would literally kill them in a few short, labored gasps.

They didn't have millions of roads and buildings - Millions of years ago. Even if it was warmer back then, at least you had some good shade. I don't think all the tar roads, and black roof tops are going to do well with 140F temperatures.

Again, that's not really the problem. It's not about whether or not we are the causation. The problem is that if the atmosphere shifts back towards the state it was in pre-ice age, we are going to be unable to breathe as we know it. The breathing masks you see in so much SF, that you can only do without for so long? They're based in some reality.

The O2 concentration could be very high and you would still suffocate if could not expunge the CO2 from your system. In fact high CO2 is what causes the suffocating feeling, not lack of oxygen.
oh, and it was around 300 ppm about a hundred years ago, that's what's scary to me.

(o) So those trapped gases must have been in the air at some point, millions of years ago, and then planet did just fine. So what's there to worry about? Uh.....

The carbon component of "those trapped gases" (i.e. - methane) may well have been "in the air" at some point in the past - but likely not as part of a methane molecule. Methane is a gas mainly produced by the decomposition of organic material. When the last ice age descended (most likely because of a meteorite or cometary impact event), it swiftly buried boreal forests in ice, and Arctic temperatures have kept the ground that they're now buried under frozen solid (which is why it's called "permafrost"). As the temperature warms, and that permafrost thaws, the decay process that the ice suspended will restart, and cause the dead and buried plant life to rot, producing very large quantities of methane gas from the carbon that used to be part of that plant life.

As for how methane clathrates (the other very large source of methane gas releases) are formed, I have yet to see a convincing explanation of the mechanism. That notwithstanding, the fact that they DO exist is indisputable - and, when deepwater temperatures rise far enough, they definitely will melt, releasing their cargo of methane into the atmosphere (the so-called "methane clathrate gun" effect) more-or-less all at once.

The current consensus is that it was the global release of large volumes of methane in the transition from the Permian to the Triassic Periods that caused the extremely large (20+ degrees Fahrenheit) increase in global temperatures that resulted in what is known as the Permian Extinction - an event that resulted in the extinction of more than 90% of all then-extant species on Earth. What is particularly scary about that event - the worst mass extinction since the Oxygen Catastrophe - is that the release of all that methane seems to have been initiated by a sharp increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide. In the Permian, that surge of CO2 was caused by a huge, long-lasting basalt flow event (a kind of large-scale volcanic eruption) called the Siberian Traps.

Today, however, the increase in atmospheric CO2 is largely manmade. Regardless of its source, the marginal warming effect of all that CO2 our electric power generation, heating, combustion engine-based transportation, and large-scale deforestation is producing will, without question, eventually result in a massive methane release, just as happened in the Permian. Our atmospheric CO2 levels are already very close to those that triggered the methane releases that resulted in the Permain Extinction, and there's no technolgy currently in existence that will allow us to "scrub" that CO2 out of our atmosphere. That, in turn, means that we're pretty much stuck with a future in which the planet warms suffiiciently to melt the polar and Greenland icecaps - and all the world's glaciers, as well - and release the methane clathrate deposits, too. How long this will take is the main unanswered question, now. The international consensus is that it will be on the order of a millenium before the planetary warming process reaches its peak, but there's some reason to believe that the icecaps are what used to be known as "chaotic systems" (i.e. - systems whose existing state is highly unstable, and subject to very rapid change if the conditions under which they are maintained change in relatively modest ways), and, if so, the collapse of the world's ice sheets could happen in as little as a century or so.

This is the problem with the plea for "simple answers". The systems we're talking about aren't simple - they're vast, complex, and (by the timescale of a single human life) slow-moving. The time to get out ahead of global warming was the 1970's. It's far too late now to prevent the planet from warming enough to melt the icecaps and change the climate sufficiently to result in another mass extinction event. At this point, we can only try to slow the process down, not stop

Yes, but... When balanced against methane sinks (using your helpful link), the NET GAIN of methane is ~20Tg/year. Which means that adding 10Tg/year would be a 50% increase in the rate of methane accumulation. Seems like bad news.

On the plus side, doing something about those cows would potentially tip the delta back down to neutral or below.

No need to waste time over the cause, I think those two camps are entrenched and few will change their minds on the actual cause. The fact is the feedback loop is already starting which means it's likely self-perpetuating or soon will be. It also means the increase can be much greater than any of the projections since no one is sure how much methane can be released so most haven't factored it in to projections. It's unlikely that the climate change can be stopped but that's no reason to not limit CO2. There was always a much bigger issue that rarely gets mentioned and that's ocean acidification. Acid oceans kill fish and coral and we don't get our oxygen and food from rain forests we get most of the oxygen and a lot of our food from the oceans so killing them is a bad idea.

Fifteen or twenty years ago, the buzz was about diminishing rain forests. Before that, it was extinction. It seems like people get tired of a world consumption message, give up on caring, and look for a new "problem" to warn ourselves about. Warming is the new rain forest, which was the new extinction. As a fifty year old environmentalist, I wonder how wise it was to take peoples focus off of habitat and onto thermometers. We need big forests to suck up the carbon. Now, that arrow is gone.

I wish I had mod points right now. You make a good point but I'm not sure if you took it far enough. People were always concerned about the environment and that is a good thing. At some level we all need to have some concern that our air, food, and water is clean. We should make sure that we don't deplete the natural resources available to us. It's just good stewardship of our planet to make sure the human species survives.

While you make a good point I think you need to take it a step further and reali

Shhh. It's hard enough to get deniers(I hate that term, is there an less biased term that doesn't give them undue credibility like "skeptic" does) to understand the concept of a second derivative, and its importance to the whole thing. Involving diff-eq is just going to lose even more.

Could you clarify? Is there some sort of skillset that you feel is lacking in the observations of people who would identify AGW as factual? I, of course, don't mean "people in the street" kind of way, but people making public arguments about AGW?

What I observe in debates I've seen are people saying things like changes in temperature exist in a natural cycle, we've seen them before, and that current temperatures are not unprecedented in nature. But these observations neglect the incredibly high second der

I can assure you that some of the "deniers" I know understand the concept of a second derivative. Perhaps even better than many who call them that. At least one of them is a mathematician specializing in analysis.

First rule of talking about someone who you don't agree with and disapprove of: Paint them as too stupid to know the truth. Failing that paint them as also being deviously clever and hiding the truth.

Don't feel bad. Those on the denial side would do the same to you. Both sides are human after all.

(I hate that term, is there an less biased term that doesn't give them undue credibility like "skeptic" does)

Anyone who thinks the word "skeptic" [reference.com] lends credibility is a dolt who fails at English, and should be treated as such.

you even provided a link to the meaning of the word yet you failed to grasp how your meaning isnt correct.

1.
a person who questions the validity or authenticity of something purporting to be factual.
2.
a person who maintains a doubting attitude, as toward values, plans, statements, or the character of others.

Its pretty much too late to do anything useful. There are some way out there schemes but the most positive effect for species survival now is figuring out how to sustain our population on a warming Earth. We're going to have to get used to more extreme weather limits and redo our calculations and weather models for starters.

I suspect that cephalopods are about to be in for a pretty wild ride. As the ocean acidifies, shell fish will have less and less protection as the calcium carbonate that makes up the bulk of their shells gets dissolved more rapidly than they can replace it. This may lead to a population boom which will be quickly turn in to a starvation scenario.

If this happens, large marine predatory fish will go through a smaller version of this, which could be followed by the replacement of these fish in their niche by large predatory cephalopods. (most likely the D. gigas or A. dux)

Of course, that's just a guess. Everything in the ocean that relies on calcium carbonate is in for a rough time. This includes fish teeth and cephalopod beaks.

Another whammy is that as the ocean acidifies, the calcium carbonate reacts with the acid to form calcium bicarbonate and carbon dioxide, further increasing the saturation of the surrounding water resulting in a lower pH and a more intense feedback loop.

Its pretty much too late to do anything useful. There are some way out there schemes but the most positive effect for species survival now is figuring out how to sustain our population on a warming Earth.

Nonsense. Once we finally run out of food and drinking water the inevitable nuclear holocaust should solve global warming straight away. Which works out great because we're overdue for both another global extinction event and another ice age. Three birds with one stone!

Its pretty much too late to do anything useful. There are some way out there schemes but the most positive effect for species survival now is figuring out how to sustain our population on a warming Earth.

You mean like moving from sprawling, single family ranch-style homes [wikipedia.org], which are expensive to cool, into the city? And planting trees and other vegetation in order to reduce the urban heat island effect? And switching to energy efficient appliances and using them at night in order to reduce cooling costs?

"We know who the active denialists are – not the people who buy the lies, mind you, but the people who create the lies. Let’s start keeping track of them now, and when the famines come, let’s make them pay. Let’s let their houses burn until the innocent are rescued."

(...mind you, this is originally posted in jest, but it points to some pretty scary shit that some folks are willin

I read the blog post you linked, and it struck me as a bit of a Tom Swiftian solution. However, I think there is a kernel of wisdom in there. If you don't remove the short-term incentive for a behavior or set of actions, you will have a much harder time controlling it.

That's how regulation is supposed to work, but along comes regulatory capture to stop all that noise.

Its sad really, that the short term has taken such a superior position in the thought and actions of many people and corporations. Its almost

So, calcium carbonate does *not* react with carbon dioxide to produce calcium bicarbonate and another carbon dioxide. That would violate conservation of mass. The reaction between calcium carbonate and carbon dioxide produces calcium bicarbonate which should precipitate out and increase the pH of the water to more neutral levels!

I could be wrong, I'm more a behavior guy than a chemistry guy, but here goes. CO2 dissolves in to ocean water and forms carbonic acid which leans to an increase in the concentration of hydrogen ions. This is typically offset by the dissolution of rock and shells leading to an increase in calcium carbonate which reacts to the acid to form an aqueous solution of calcium bicarbonate, which by the way, doesn't precipitate out of water. Depending on temperature and pressure, there is a depth where there is a ba

When do we stop chasing that ghost and get over it? Really...The big freeze, acid rain, a gap in the ozon layer, and now this witch hunt. *sigh*Can we, for the sake of Cowboy Neal, just stop doing this, get real and do some real science?

It all sounds like:Sir Bedevere: What makes you think there is global warming?Peasant: Well, the global warming turned me into a newt!Sir Bedevere: A newt?Peasant: -meekly-... I got better.Crowd: (shouts) Stop driving your car anyway!!!

Except that, of your examples, two of the three (acid rain and the ozone hole) are provably real things and didn't become the doomsday scenarios thrown around when they were new news because the reporting on them spurred large scale action removing the major contributing factors. Nice try, though, with the false equivalencies.

I agree. Global warming is no longer news, and hasn't been since carbon dioxide was shown to be a greenhouse gas in the first half of the 19th century. We know it's coming, ready or not. The science of anthropogenic global warming is not news, it's physics.

Whoa, hold on to your horses with your science oversimplification strawman. Sure we know all that about CO2, but we don't know what'll happen to it -- will it just sit there in the atmosphere? Will the changing climate affect how CO2 is released or absorbed by the oceans and the biosphere? Questions, questions, questions abound. Yes, surely a conservative approach is prudent, just in case everything was to go according to the direst predictions. Yet we can't claim it's anything more than willing to play it

when someone builds a coal fired power station next door to you, and you start getting rain that eats into paintwork, and when you experience heatwaves that can give you sunburn even with 30+ lotion on, and maybe when you stop taking for gospel what idiot journos like James Delingpole tell you with absolutely no counter-evidence

really... do you have any scientific evidence that the earth isn't undergoing global warming?
and no, saying that "CO2 isn't a pollutant" is neither evidence or scientific
of c

so what about them? do you think they indicate global warming isn't occurring? where do they say that (with any scientific credibility)? you and i probably wouldn't have the expertise to interpret said data even if we had access to it all.
the problem is that you have been told by someone (likely a moron journo) that the last 10 years of temperature records indicates that global warming isn't occurring, and you believed it. in reality you have absolutely no clue what temperature records indicate, because the amount of data that implies is enormous, and 10 years isn't likely even enough time to indicate anything about the global temperature trend any more than summer temperatures are generally warmer than winter ones. if you referred to the last 100 years of temperature records it would at least seem more convincing (even if i knew you were still a gullible slave to corporate mass media)

CO2 isn't more a pollutant than water

from Wikipedia [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_pollution], "Air pollution is the introduction of chemicals, particulate matter, or biological materials that cause harm or discomfort to humans or other living organisms, or cause damage to the natural environment or built environment, into the atmosphere."
...of course i didn't realize you were ignorant enough to need the definition of pollution pointed out to you.
co2 is a pollutant because it is released into the atmosphere as a product of combustion. water is also a product, but it isn't a pollutant.
if c02 were released deep underground (carbon capture), it would not be a pollutant because it isn't being released into the atmosphere.

What makes sense is to say that an excess of CO2 might be bad for the earth

so might an excess of ignorance

there's less and less consensus about it

amongst who exactly? a runaway greenhouse effect isn't exactly rocket science. morons argue that a volcano spits out more co2 than all of humanity like it makes everything ok. what they seem to be completely oblivious to is that if enough volcanos spew enough co2 into the atmosphere, it will be just as bad.
the whole point of the global warming debate was that humanity shouldn't be the cause of its own destruction; there has never been any argument that a runaway greenhouse effect couldn't occur naturally, in which case of course we could do little about it.

so what about them? do you think they indicate global warming isn't occurring? where do they say that (with any scientific credibility)? you and i probably wouldn't have the expertise to interpret said data even if we had access to it all.

So, I don't have the expertise to read a curve, and say if it goes up or down? COME ON !!!

Well, no. You don't.

You're not reading a curve. You're reading a collection of superimposed curves. If you want to know what the warming effect due to CO2 increase is you've got to remove other effects.

It has been warming.
I don't remember the exact details, but I thought it was like this:
If you cherry-pick the two years 1998 and 2008 (1998 being quite warm and 2008 a bit colder than the trend), and fit a line on the 10 temperatures from that particular 10 year period, then you can't say with 95% certainty that there's an upward trend, but only with less certainty IIRC. And they put Phil Jones on the spot "can you say with 95% certainty that it became warmer in that 10 year period?". So he had to say no.

I used the emotionally laden word cherry-pick because if you take another recent period of 10 years, or another period ending at 2008, or another period starting at 1998, then the upward trend is much clearer.
Please look at the graph: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/Fig.A2.gif .
Guess why the years 1998 and 2008 were taken. Get the data yourself (from NOAA or HadCRUT3), and plot it with something that can draw a linear regression line from the past 15 years that you mentioned (1996 to 2011) or just use a ruler and some common sense to draw a line through the points.
Then do the same for 1998 to 2008 (the cherry-picked data), and finally to see the famous "hockey-stick" one from 1898 to 2008.

Don't waste your time arguing why I'm wrong or stupid, just go download that data and draw it for yourself. I dare you.